V‑Spark Version 3.4.2 focuses on internal improvements in performance and stability, and also adds new administrative capabilities for managing and monitoring disk use.

1. Configurable data retention policies - Companies and organizations can now specify the period of time for which call and analysis data is preserved on their systems. This helps reduce storage costs, and also reduces the chance that your V‑Spark system will encounter problems due to running out of storage space.

2. Improved handling of low storage conditions - System administrators can now configure the minimum amount of free local storage space that must be available in order for V‑Spark to continue transcribing and analyzing new data.

3. External Authentication - System administrators can now configure V‑Spark to use certain external authentication mechanisms to enable user logins. Contact support@vocitec.com if you are interested in this capability.

4. Search Unification - Adhoc search and search within applications are substantially unified at customer request to make it easier to predict the behavior of search within applications.

5. Transcribe API now accepts single files - When using the /transcribe API to submit individual files for transcription, single audio or JSON files can now be submitted individually. This was always possible using the GUI and is now possible using the API. Files submitted individually will not be associated with each other. Multiple files, such as audio files and metadata files that should be associated, must still be combined into a single ZIP file and submitted together.

6. Search Expression Improvements - In application scoring searches, the underscore character (' _ '), a wildcard matching 0 or more words, and the ' --> ' character combination, matching phrases in consecutive speaker turns, are no longer supported. When upgrading to V‑Spark 3.4-2, the underscore character will be automatically scored as ' ~t ' (search for phrases appearing within a single speaker turn) in existing applications. The ' --> ' character combination is no longer supported in apps, and must be replaced manually in applications because there is no exact replacement.

7. Application Search Scoring Improvements - Leaf-level categories without include phrases will now receive a count score of 1 to indicate that files have passed filters in the leaf's upper-level categories. Scoring for time-based phrases is available on a limited/early-access basis. Contact support@vocitec.com for more information.

This section identifies specific issues that have been resolved in the 3.4.2 release of V‑Spark:

1. Wildcard search works for custom metadata date fields - Previously, custom metadata in datetime format could not be searched using wildcards, and trying to do so would generate an error.

2. Time-based adhoc search results for ~e are now correct - If any call data was uploaded for analysis on versions 3.3.0, 3.3.1, and 3.4.1, an additional update script must be run to enable the use of ~e in adhoc searches. Contact support@vocitec.com for more information.

3. Complex searches for transcript exclude phrases with other search terms are now supported - Previously, adhoc searches for different types of terms (custom metadata, tags, etc.) with transcript exclude phrases would ignore the exclude phrase.

4. App reprocessing of folders with a very large number of files was timing out and producing an error. The timeout value for search operations included in App reprocessing is now configurable. If you need to reprocess folders that contain a very large number of files, you can avoid errors by increasing the timeout value.

5. Clicking the Call duration graphs now updates the file list - In versions 3.3.1 and 3.4.1, no results were displayed when the Daily Charts graphs for Call duration were clicked.

6. User subscriptions requests to Daily Report emails were sometimes being duplicated by the UI, resulting in multiple copies of some reports being attached to the email. Subscription requests are now checked against existing values before they are added to the description table, which avoids this duplication. Users who are receiving duplicate reports should unsubscribe from all reports, and re-subscribe manually.

7. Spaces in custom metadata field names are no longer saved as non-breaking spaces - Fixed an issue where spaces in custom metadata field names were being saved as non-breaking spaces which could cause an issue with app processing if custom metadata was used as a category filter.

8. Text files sent via callbacks for non-English calls now include the transcript content - In 3.4.1, text files sent via callbacks were empty for transcripts that contained non-ASCII characters. JSON files were not affected.

9. New fields cannot be given reserved names - It was possible to add custom metadata fields that had the same name as reserved built-in fields. The UI and API now restrict the creation of fields so that only non-reserved names can be used.

10. CSV export supports all available fields - All available fields can now be selected in the V‑Spark user interface for inclusion when exporting data in CSV (Comma-Separated Value) format. UI CSV export now matches /search API export results.

This section identifies fixes that were introduced in patch releases and hot fixes since the initial 3.4.2 release, and are therefore now included in the latest version of the 3.4.2 release. Maintenance versions and associated fixes are listed earliest to most recent:

1. Folder callbacks send only specified files types - Callback worker was sending JSON, Text, and MP3 files, regardless of which file types a folder's callback was configured to send. (3.4.2-2)

2. Content-type for MP3 files is specified in http callbacks - HTTP callbacks were not specifying the content-type when sending MP3 files. (3.4.2-2)

3. Application scoring does not fail for files with no utterances - System was reporting processing errors when a file with no utterances was uploaded to a folder linked to an application or included in a folder that was reprocessed for an application. (3.4.2-2)

4. The /config/CO_SHORT/users/USERNAME API call was returning user information within an extraneous username layer. The response has been modified to remove that layer. (3.4.2-5)

5. The /config API call was returning Application information within an extraneous Apps layer, even if only one Application was requested. The response has been modified to remove that layer when configuration information for only one App has been requested. (3.4.2-5)

6. The /search API was returning an error when searching for App scores. The command has been fixed to prevent the error and return App scores as expected. (3.4.2-5)

7. Daily and monthly reports would fail to generate if any agentid had more than 24 hours of talk time in one day. This can occur if talk time for multiple agents is reported with no associated agentid or with the same agentid . The reports have been corrected to report daily agent talk times in HH+:MM:SS format if the number of talk time hours for that agent is greater than 24. (3.4.2-6)

8. The /search API was not allowing searches for categories that had spaces in their names. These searches would fail. This defect has been corrected, and searches for categories that have spaces in their names return proper results. (3.4.2-6)

9. Application scoring was not producing correct scores for categories with "Speakers:" phrases. This defect has been corrected, and the scores now reflect both speakers. (3.4.2-6)

10. Application scoring was not producing correct scores for categories with phrases containing boolean operators OR (|) and AND (&). (3.4.2-7)

11. Application scoring was not producing correct scores for categories with custom metadata exclude filters if the file being scored did not contain the metadata field being filtered. (3.4.2-7)

12. Additional security fixes were applied. (3.4.2-7)

13. Improve handling of concurrent /transcribe API requests. (3.4.2-8)

V‑Spark 3.4.2 does not add any new announcements of upcoming changes and deprecation. Please see Announcements with 3.4.1 for announcements made with the 3.4.1 release.

1. Partial configuration updates for a company ( /config/ CO_SHORT) or organization ( /config/ CO_SHORT/ORG_SHORT) using the REST API are not currently supported. Attempting to update a subset of a company or organization using the REST API currently returns HTTP error code 400. You must supply all fields for the configuration in order to update any field(s) using the REST API.

2. Application re-processing of more than 100,000 files in a single operation may time out.

3. Custom metadata field names may only contain standard ASCII characters, excluding = and : , which are reserved characters.

4. Issues with Dashboard Displays

   • Files uploaded to a folder that is linked to a disabled application or that have not been reprocessed will still appear in the Files View on the application dashboard

5. Issues with Search

   • Time-based search

     • Searches are turn-based and may return results for phrases that are outside of the requested timeframe if those phrases are within the same speaker turn

     • Ad-hoc Search snippets in the Files View may display results outside the specified time interval

   • Exceptions to standard File Details highlighting:

     • Searches using (~n) may highlight phrases with the specified number of words in between each of the search terms, rather than between all of the search terms. For example, "get help phone ~4" may highlight phrases with 4 words between "get" and "help" and another 4 words between "help" and "phone". Searches using (~t) and (~n) will only be highlighted if the words matched appear in the order specified in the search tag.

     • Highlighting may be incomplete for matches marked with emotion

     • Highlighting may be incomplete for matches with intervening silence tags greater than 2 seconds

     • Matches for "@*" (such as when searching for email addresses) will only be highlighted until the first "." in the email address. Regular expression searches may be used to circumvent this issue.

     • Excluded application search phrases may be highlighted on the File Details page. Note that these exceptions only affect highlighting, and that all search results using the above characters will still be accurate.

6. Other

   • Users playing longer audio files via Firefox may encounter playback/syncing issues when jumping to different sections of the transcript. This is an external issue caused by the Firefox browser. Users who encounter this issue can simply wait for the browser to finish buffering the file before resuming their search.

   • The /appstats API is not returning any categories if the top category score is zero, even if the depth level is defined to return categories with scores of zero.

   • The /transcribe API is not processing audio files if they were uploaded from Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). The system is returning an empty reply.

   • Uploaded JSON files that contain an empty Utterances field are not being reprocessed properly.

7. The /search API allows searches for application categories that have hyphens and other restricted characters in their names, however these searches fail. Voci application templates that had hyphens and other restricted characters in their names have been modified to remove the restricted characters. All existing application category names should be modified to remove restricted characters.

8. The /config/CO_SHORT/ORG_SHORT/apps/APPNAME API is not returning the correct template value for Applications that were created from templates. It is returning the "template" value of "custom" even for Applications that were created from templates.